Online and in the flesh, most people who get to know me at all do so through my obsessions with film, comics, and (especially) videogames. But here’s a confession: I have an unrealized passion for photography. I could wax eloquent as to “why,” but I’ll spare you, mainly because so many others have already traveled down that path.
IPR’s Artist and industries relations coordinator Brian “Champtown” Harmon has teamed up with the number one urban website in the world allhiphop.com to launch his underground video show entitled Footage Fa Dayz.
The show has been on just four weeks and has already had close to five hundred thousand views. Footage Fa Dayz features vintage interviews ranging back as far as fourteen years as well as current footage with today’s artists. This week Champ has teamed up with IPR instructor Matthias Saunders, known around the world as the Notorious DOP (Director of Photography). Matthias’s skills can be seen on smash classic movies like Ghostbusters; he’s also lent his hand to such notorious artists as Spike Lee.
This week the IPR duo teamed up to do three episodes of Footage Fa Dayz with Minneapolis Rhymesayers recording artist Brother Ali.
Matthias Saunders stated, “It was an honor doing these episodes with Champ and Brother Ali, both of these guys are amazing, their hip hop IQ is second to none.” Saunders continued, “It was hard to edit these episodes because everything champ and Ali discuss is very strong information that could not be left out - I had no choice but to make this a three part series!”
Footage Fa Days episodes of Brother Ali air Tuesday, June 30th along with a special independent week series on allhiphop.com
Click here to watch the interview…
While I can’t roll with the video’s depiction of Parsons, it’s hardly YouTube’s most stupidly sanctimonious. Plus, it’s good to see him getting more attention, especially with Jóhann Jóhannsson’s predictably magnificent track framing it.
Given Minneapolis’s “most literate city” ranking, geological stability (*), resistance to tidal waves, and welcoming climate (compared to, say, Pluto or Hell), we’d have to consider ourselves lucky even if Ronen Givony hadn’t made us (via the Southern Theater) the second beneficiary of his consistently inspired Wordless Music series. Thanks to the impresario’s singular vision and the Southern’s hospitality, we’ve been growing steadily luckier ever since Valgeir Sigurðsson and Nico Muhly booted the series here back in ‘07.
From Jóhannsson’s third album, 2006’s “IBM 1401: A User’s Manual.”
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How does somebody acquire a particular set of skills? Authorities at the Chongqing Children’s Training Center in China believe an individual’s capabilities might be determined by superior genes. Using DNA microarrays - tests enabling the identification of 13 traits–they recently began testing their theories on 1,000 children.. (Got eugenics?) Eschewing nature in favor of nurture, renowned authors Geoff Colvin and Malcolm Gladwell maintain that 10,000 hours of practice and countless variables yield mastery.
As I have yet to display traces of any talents displayed by the past two generations of Stallocks, Nays, Augustsons, Wikstroms, etc., I’m banking on Gladwell, et. al., especially in the kitchen.
DNA.
Newcomers to Jennifer Davis’s work usually succumb immediately.
When, in 1873’s The Renaissance, Walter Pater wrote, “all art aspires to the condition of music,” he couldn’t have been more dead-on. But that was then, when the modern gallery system had only just barely started opening up the art market to regular folks and freeing artists from the tyranny that often accompanied salon exhibitions and patronage. In our century, all art (in this post. strictly visual) aspires to the condition of being less neatly pigeonholed than in Pater’s day: less exclusively the fiefdom of a few rich Europeans, and more a global exaltation supported in part by a force far greater than any elite could ever muster: internet commerce.
